In Memory of Ruth Pearl, Mother of Slain Journalist Daniel Pearl

To understand a mother’s love is to know the story of Ruth Pearl.

Ruth, as many called her, knew before anyone that her son’s life was in danger.

On January 23, 2002, she awakened in her home in California with a startling dream and wrote an email to her son, Danny, warning him to be careful, thousands of miles away in Karachi, Pakistan, where he was staying with his wife, Mariane, at a home I had rented on Zamzama Street. Danny and I were friends from our work together at the Wall Street Journal. Alas, later that evening, Danny slipped into a taxi for an interview from which he never returned.

Five weeks later, the FBI learned militants had slain Danny. It was a mother’s nightmare come true. Ruth would outlive her child. Born Ruth Rejwan in Baghdad, Iraq in 1935, Ruth Pearl died this week, 19 years later.

But what Ruth did over these 19 years is testimony to a mother’s love and her character and grace. “My beautiful, wise, generous, loving mama who overcame the traumas in her life with strength and vitality and dedication to helping others died today,” her eldest daughter, Tamara, wrote to friends.

But what Ruth did over these 19 years is testimony to a mother’s love and her character and grace.

In June 1941, as a six-year-old girl in Baghdad, born in the capital of Iraq to one of the city’s Jewish families, Ruth witnessed a massacre, the Farhud, when at least 180 Jews were killed by locals, wreaking chaos during a power vacuum. “It was like a movie,” she recalled in an interview, watching looting and violence. As bullets flew, her father led her family to the cellar. “I had nightmares,” she said, for decades.

She met her husband, Judea, at Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology. With her passing, he wrote, “I’ve lost my dear wife this afternoon, my northern-star and my college sweetheart.”

Her son, too, loved her deeply. In the summer of 1994, Danny picked La Tomate, a local restaurant in D.C., to take her out to dinner when she was visiting, and he amused her all night with tales from his life, a soft smile on her face all evening. By the winter of 2002, theirs was to be an ordinarily sweet family story, with Mariane and Danny expecting their first son, Adam. Instead, Ruth was catapulted with her family to the global stage.

That year, Ruth and Judea began the Daniel Pearl Foundation to celebrate Danny’s devotion to journalism, music and friendship. Ruth built an honorary board with dignitaries like foreign correspondent Christiane Amanpour and Pakistani humanitarian Abdul Sattar Edhi. But she kept her eyes set on emerging journalists she wanted to uplift and sponsored fellows from Muslim countries. The fellows worked in the newsrooms of the Jewish Journal and other media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal. “We felt this way we are opening their eyes to the fact that Jews and Muslims are not that different,” said Ruth, in an interview. She began Daniel Pearl World Music Day, with concerts to mark Danny’s birthday, October 10. She coauthored with Judea a book, “I am Jewish,” with testimonials from Jews around the world. She built friendships with journalists from the land where her son took his last breath. “Indeed, she was a North Star for all of us,” wrote Ammara Durrani, one of the many Daniel Pearl Foundation fellows from Pakistan that Ruth welcomed into her home like family.

Last spring, as the COVID pandemic kept families in their homes, Ruth heard the news that judges in the Sindh High Court in Karachi had decided to free the four men convicted in Danny’s murder. Ruth and Judea had a decision to make. Would they appeal the decision? They decided immediately to appeal, but that was no small task. While frail and sick, breathing through oxygen tubes, Ruth sat in a Zoom meeting with a notary public to deliver to the Pakistan Supreme Court the power-of-attorney documents that her lawyers needed to represent her in court. The lawsuit was filed with her name first and then her husband’s name: “Ruth Pearl and Another vs. The State…”

Days later, she slipped into a jacket with a gentle white trim, put on her glasses and—with as much energy as she could muster—she recorded a video appeal for justice and told the world, “There’s not a single day that we don’t miss our son.”

She only had the energy to record 37 seconds of words, but those 37 seconds brought tears to the eyes of friends and strangers around the world because they captured something profound: a mother’s love and the grace and courage that was the life of Ruth Pearl.

Asra Q. Nomani is cofounder of the Pearl Project, an initiative dedicated to realizing justice for Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. She can be reached at asra@asranomani.com.